Pope Benedict XVI will begin using the Twitter
micro-blogging website next week, in a bid to expand the Catholic
church's reach on the internet, the Vatican said Monday.
Benedict will start tweeting on the @pontifex_it account as of
December 12, a statement said. He will answer questions "about faith
and belief" that the public can already start asking him, the Vatican
said.
"The pope's presence on Twitter is a concrete expression of his
conviction that the (Catholic) Church must be present in the digital
arena," the Vatican indicated.
The English version of the papal account had over 7,700 followers
as of 12:30 pm (1130 GMT), with numbers growing by hundreds every
minute. The pontiff was not following any other Twitter user, aside
from the six other language versions of his account.
Papal tweets will come in Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, German,
Polish, Arabic and French - but not in Latin, the official language
of the Catholic Church. Other languages may follow in the future, the
Holy See said.
Initially, the tweets will be published only on Wednesdays, the
day on which the pope holds his weekly audience. But "they could also
become more frequent."
The decision to launch a papal account on Twitter "is ultimately
an endorsement" of those church figures that have already embraced
the internet through personal sites, blogs and micro-blogs, the
Vatican said.
The Vatican has had an official YouTube channel since 2009, while
Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, the pope's minister of culture, is a keen
Twitter user. His account, with entries ranging from Bible excerpts
to quotes from John Lennon, has over 26,000 followers.
In January, Ravasi wrote on L'Espresso, a left-wing Italian
weekly, an article headlined: "Even Jesus would use Twitter."
